


Knowing

by Viridian5



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Episode Related, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 1999-04-03
Updated: 1999-04-03
Packaged: 2017-10-02 09:36:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4935
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Viridian5/pseuds/Viridian5
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How well do we really know anyone?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Knowing

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for "Arcadia" and "Alpha."
> 
> In "Alpha," I got the feeling that the writer mentioned online correspondence in the expectation that the audience would immediately agree, like the ridiculously narrow-minded Scully presented there did, that the relationship had to be Wrong and Karin Berquist had to be up to No Good. Since that really bothered me, especially after seeing the stabilizing effect Karin had on Mulder...
> 
> Beta by Orithain.

As I sat back and looked at the poster, I had to wonder how well I'd really known Karin. By Scully's standards, of meeting Karin in person and talking with her, I hadn't. If knowing her had meant being able to instantly foresee that she would commit suicide to take Detweiler down, then I hadn't known her. Did meeting me mark people for death?

Yet I had known her. I think I'd known her about as well as you could know anyone you spoke to for a few hours at a time a few nights a week for three months. I think she'd been honest with me in those talks. Maybe not honest in telling me in every damned thing about her--no one could or should expect that--but honest in that everything she'd told me had been true.

And I... I'd been more honest and open with her than I'd been with anyone in a long time.

It still surprised me that Scully had never asked how I'd linked up with Karin. I'd read Karin's books, and I may not have agreed with everything in them, but I'd liked the way she'd put her arguments together. When I'd seen that she had a website and an e-mail address, I figured why not? I hadn't expected it to really lead anywhere, but the correspondence that had started seemed to have kept us both interested.

I had some security in the way I'd contacted her. I knew people tended to lie about themselves online. Hell, sometimes I went on as a teenaged girl who called herself "Lucretia." She even had her own e-mail address. I'd started it just as an experiment, but the responses she'd received had been so damned interesting... Even she wasn't a total lie; I'd patched the identity together from parts of myself.

Anyway, knowing who Karin was had let me be myself. With her, I hadn't had a reputation to live up or down to. I could be as weird as I was without having to be aggressively weird just because it was expected of me. Her own out there theories had enabled me to air my own without any fear of ridicule.

More than that, our conversations had made me see something about myself that I hadn't let myself see before: that I unconsciously "performed" for most people, tried to give them what I thought they expected of me. I'd been doing it since childhood, instantly shifting who I was to better deal with Dad's sudden rages and depressions.

For example, I gave supervisors and local authorities exactly the kind of arrogance they expected, the first from my reputation and the second from me being a federal agent poaching on their turf. I even did it for Scully, being exactly as strange, illogical, and inappropriate as she thought me to be. She seemed to get nervous and confused when I strayed from it, so I tried not to.

But I realized that I'd started to chafe under my role for her recently and camp up my performance. After my online chats with Karin had revealed it, my time with Scully in The Falls at Arcadia had cemented it all for me. I couldn't help myself from going overboard in my partner role for her, and it all tied in to being able to be so gleefully anarchic around the homeowners. The restraints and freedom combined had made me about as manic as I could get. Even I was appalled by some of the things I'd said to Scully. I'd felt like a cartoon character.

Which still hadn't meant I could stop myself.

So talking to Karin, who had no prior knowledge of me and expected nothing, had made me see how dependent I'd been on visual and vocal cues. Dealing only with her words had left me flying blind, uncertain of how I was supposed to react. Eventually, it had started to feel liberating. We'd only known one another by the turn of our thoughts, and she'd actually liked mine.

As for knowing people, having been Scully's partner for six years still hadn't given me a clue as to why she'd reacted to Karin the way she had. If it walks like a jealous woman and talks like a jealous woman... But that had to be wrong. Aside from the occasional flash of rueful affection, most of the time it seemed that Scully could barely stand to be in the same room with me. Yet she'd been outraged by the thought that I'd corresponded with a woman who might want to meet me. Karin might as well have assaulted me once I'd walked in the door.

Territoriality? One alpha female fighting off what she saw as a threat to her pack? I didn't know.

I hadn't really known Karin. I didn't really know Scully.

I didn't know a damned thing.

### End


End file.
